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whether that would even be possible to strike before the Iranians entered their
“zone of immunity” – the point at which the amount of damage we could do to
their nuclear program would be too negligible to be worth the operational, political
and diplomatic risks from such an attack. In the early months, my priority was to
ensure we at least had a military option. A full year before joining Bibi’s
government, as Defense Minister under Olmert, I’d first tried to put an operational
plan in place, only to find that the lack of heavy munitions and refuelling aircraft
made it impossible. That was especially frustrating because at that point, our
experts calculated that a successful strike could have set back the Iranian nuclear
effort by about six years. Given the Iranians’ knowledge we could attack again,
and their need to restart clandestine efforts to secure key components abroad, that
meant a very real prospect of ending the nuclear program altogether. On joining
Bibi’s government, I began working, both with the kirya and the engineers and
technological experts in our military industries, to make sure we had the weaponry
and equipment, and an operational plan for a surgical strike. It was not until mid-
2010, a year into Bibi’s government, that I was confident we’d reached that point,
in part thanks to Israeli-produced heavy bombs and tanker aircraft. Our experts
estimated we would still be able to set back the Iranian nuclear efforts by up to
four years, almost certainly enough to end them indefinitely.

Yet making military action possible proved to be the easy part. The question
now became whether we should be prepared to launch a strike against Iran’s
nuclear facilities. Answering it was like a contest of three-dimensional chess,
involving both an internal debate among Israel’s political and military leadership
and discussions with an Obama administration whose priority remained to
negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear program. On major security decisions in Israel,
two ministers always mattered the most: the Prime Minister and Defense Minister.
Neither Bibi nor I doubted we had to ready to strike if that proved necessary. Nor
did Foreign Minister Lieberman. Even for us, it was an option to be considered
only when all other ways to rein in the Iranians were failing. We also agreed on
two other preconditions. We would have to secure international legitimacy, most of
all from the Americans, for what would be a clear act of self-defense. And we’d
need to demonstrate an imperative urgency to act, with the approach of the “zone
of immunity” that would take any military option off the table for good.

Ideally, we hoped the US-led campaign of economic and diplomatic pressure
would get Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, as Libya had done in the wake of

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